Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

In Defense of Ordinary Moral Character Judgment

  • Original Research
  • Published:
Erkenntnis Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Moral character judgments pervade our everyday social interactions. But are these judgments epistemically reliable? In this paper, I discuss a challenge to the reliability of ordinary virtue and vice attribution that emerges from Christian Miller’s Mixed Traits theory of moral character, which entails that the majority of our ordinary moral character judgments are false. In response to this challenge, I argue that a key prediction of this theory is not borne out by the available evidence; this evidence further suggests that our moral character judgments do converge upon real psychological properties of individuals. I go on to argue that this is because the evidence for the Mixed Traits Theory does not capture the kind of compassionate behaviors that ordinary folk really care about. Ultimately, I suggest that our ordinary standards for virtue and vice have a restricted social scope, which reflects the parochial nature of our characterological moral psychology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Of course, all things are not always equal, and so individual behavior is always quite variable from one situation to the next. Even highly extraverted people will, over the course of a week, display some behaviors consistent with extreme introversion. But this is consistent with displaying high average levels of extraversion, which remain stable over time (Epstein 1979; Fleeson 2001).

  2. Note that this is merely one of many minimal thresholds for compassion that Miller articulates.

  3. One general worry here is that many of the studies Miller draws upon would be considered statistically underpowered and vulnerable to non-replication by contemporary standards, which have changed rapidly since the advent of the replication crisis in psychology (Alfano 2018; Collaboration 2015; Miller 2017). In my view, these considerations should weaken our confidence in some of the results Miller relies on, but not erase it entirely. His survey of the literature is broad enough that his overall argument could still hold even if it were found that a significant proportion of these studies do not replicate.

  4. The “fundamental attribution error” is our tendency to explain behaviors in terms of dispositional causes even when explanations involving situational causes are more plausible (Gilbert et al. 1995; Ross 1977). Notably, Miller expresses significant unease with the way these findings are interpreted (Miller 2014, pp. 158–170). Elsewhere, I have argued that the fundamental attribution error and other biases like it are less detrimental to the reliability of our character judgments than they seem, because they do not reflect the way that our character judgments update in response to new information (Westra 2019). In what follows, I focus mainly on Miller’s claims about our trait concepts and set the issue of the fundamental attribution error to one side.

  5. The cross-cultural generalizability of this research is a complex matter. Some patterns of agreement in personality judgment, such as differences in how one rates the self and how one rates others, have been found to replicate across numerous cultural samples (Albright et al. 1997; Allik et al. 2010). However, other aspects of personality judgment, such as the degree to which people tend to view themselves as similar to others, vary based on several cultural factors, such as institutional collectivism (Ott-Holland et al. 2014). An added source of complexity in these comparisons is that it is not clear whether the same basic personality dimensions emerge in all cultures (Church 2016); if personality traits themselves are different in some cultures, this limits our ability to assess agreement using the same standardized measures of personality.

  6. Miller (2014, p. 144) acknowledges that the content of the Honesty-Humility factor is distinctively moral, but denies that scoring highly on this factor would be enough to count as virtuous according to his various minimal thresholds. This dismissal is too hasty, however. First, even if we accepted Miller’s claim that high scores on Honesty-Humility would not suffice for genuine virtue, the corollary claim that low scores on this dimension would not suffice for vice is quite implausible. Second, answers to the Honesty-Humility questionnaire items correlate strongly with how people rate themselves using adjectives that express both virtue and vice concepts, suggesting that these questions do reflect commonsense standards for how these terms are used (Ashton et al. 2006; Lee et al. 2005).

  7. Notably, Helzer et al. (2014) was conducted on both a community sample and a student sample. Agreement about moral character traits was significantly higher in the community sample than the student sample, which accounts for some of the weakness in the trait-level agreement. The authors suggest that this may have been due to the fact that informants in this group tended to use a more restricted range of the trait scales than the community sample, indicating that they refrained from making more negative trait attributions about their peers, or were otherwise unable to identify less moral targets. Alternatively, they suggest that character traits may simply be less consistent in younger populations when it is still developing, and that moral character does not stabilize until later in adulthood (Helzer et al. 2014, pp. 1707–1708).

  8. Suppose, by analogy, that deontology was the correct moral theory, but that ordinary folk intuitions about morality were purely consequentialist. The deontologist might readily concede that ordinary folk intuitions actually succeed in reliably tracking consequences, while still denying that ordinary folk have the correct conception of morality. Their quarrel with the folk would not about their capacity for reliable consequentialist judgment, but rather a normative disagreement. This case is like the Strong Normative Standards Objection. In contrast, one might accept that the folk are right and that consequentialism is correct, while also holding that ordinary intuitions about consequences are highly unreliable in practice. This case is more like the CET.

  9. I am grateful to Peter Carruthers, John Michael, and Jennifer Nagel for comments on drafts of this paper.

References

  • Albright, L., Dong, Q., Fang, X., Malloy, T. E., Kenny, D. A., Winquist, L., et al. (1997). Cross-cultural consensus in personality judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(3), 558–569.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alfano, M. (2011). Explaining away intuitions about traits: Wdhy virtue ethics seems plausible (even if it Isn’t). Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(1), 121–136.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alfano, M. (2013). Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alfano, M. (2018). A plague on both your houses: Virtue theory after situationism and repligate. Teoria, 38(2), 115–122.

    Google Scholar 

  • Allik, J., Realo, A., Mõttus, R., Borkenau, P., Kuppens, P., & Hřebíčková, M. (2010). How people see others is different from how people see themselves: A replicable pattern across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(5), 870–882.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). Modern moral philosophy. Philosophy, 33(124), 1–19.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2007). Empirical, theoretical, and practical advantages of the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(2), 150–166.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2009). The HEXACO-60: A short measure of the major dimensions of personality. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(4), 340–345.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2010). Trait and source factors in HEXACO-PI-R self- and observer reports. European Journal of Personality, 24(3), 278–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., de Vries, R. E., Perugini, M., Gnisci, A., & Sergi, I. (2006). The HEXACO model of personality structure and indigenous lexical personality dimensions in Italian, Dutch, and English. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(6), 851–875.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2004). A hierarchical analysis of 1,710 English personality-descriptive adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(5), 707–721.

    Google Scholar 

  • Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Griffitt, C. A., Barrientos, S., Brandt, J. R., Sprengelmeyer, P., et al. (1989). Negative-state relief and the empathy—altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(6), 922.

    Google Scholar 

  • Batson, C. D., Dyck, J., Brandt, J., Batson, J., Powell, A., & McMaster, M. (1988). Five studies testing two new egoistic alternatives to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(1), 52–77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baumard, N., André, J. B., & Sperber, D. (2013). A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(1), 59–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Biesanz, J. C., West, S. G., & Millevoi, A. (2007). What do you learn about someone over time? The relationship between length of acquaintance and consensus and self-other agreement in judgments of personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 119–135.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bollich, K. L., Doris, J. M., Vazire, S., Raison, C. L., Jackson, J. J., & Mehl, M. R. (2016). Eavesdropping on character: Assessing everyday moral behaviors. Journal of Research in Personality, 61, 15–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cann, A., & Blackwelder, J. G. (1984). Compliance and mood: A field investigation of the impact of embarrassment. The Journal of Psychology, 117(2), 221–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • Church, A. T. (2016). Personality traits across cultures. Current Opinion in Psychology, 8, 22–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, T. R., Panter, A. T., Turan, N., Morse, L., & Kim, Y. (2013). Agreement and similarity in self-other perceptions of moral character. Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 816–830.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, T. R., Wolf, S. T., Panter, A. T., & Insko, C. A. (2011). Introducing the GASP scale: A new measure of guilt and shame proneness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 947–966.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collaboration, O. S. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716.

    Google Scholar 

  • Connelly, B. S., & Ones, D. S. (2010). An other perspective on personality: Meta-analytic integration of observers’ accuracy and predictive validity. Psychological Bulletin, 136(6), 1092–1122.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conner, T. S., Tennen, H., Fleeson, W., & Barrett, L. F. (2009). Experience sampling methods: A modern idiographic approach to personality research. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(3), 292–313.

    Google Scholar 

  • Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory Manual. Odessa: Osychological Assessment Resources.

    Google Scholar 

  • DePaulo, B. M. (2004). The many faces of lies. In A. G. Miller (Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (pp. 303–326). New York: Guilford Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • DePaulo, B. M., Kashy, D. A. (1998). Everyday lies in close and casual relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(1), 63–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doris, J. M. (2002). Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunbar, R. I. M. (2008). Cognitive constraints on the structure and dynamics of social networks. Group Dynamics, 12(1), 7–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014). The social brain: Psychological underpinnings and implications for the structure of organizations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(2), 109–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dunlop, P. D., Morrison, D. L., Koenig, J., & Silcox, B. (2012). Comparing the Eysenck and HEXACO models of personality in the prediction of adult delinquency. European Journal of Personality, 26(3), 194–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, S. (1979). The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(7), 1097.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2002). A model of (often mixed stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyersonality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a structure- and process-integrated view of personality: Traits as density distributions of states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(6), 1011–1027.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fleeson, W., Furr, R. M., Jayawickreme, E., Meindl, P., & Helzer, E. G. (2014). Character: The prospects for a personality-based perspective on morality. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8, 178–191.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freeman, D., Aquino, K., & McFerran, B. (2009). Overcoming beneficiary race as an impediment to charitable donations: Social dominance orientation, the experience of moral elevation, and donation behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(1), 72–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Funder, D. C. (1995). On the accuracy of personality judgement: A realistic approach. Psychological Review, 102(4), 652–670.

    Google Scholar 

  • Furr, R. M. (2010). The double-entry intraclass correlation as an index of profile similarity: meaning, limitations, and alternatives. Journal of Personality Assessment, 92(1), 1–15.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, D. T., Malone, P. S., Aronson, J., Giesler, B., Higgins, T., Ross, L., ... Trope, Y. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117(1), 21–38.

  • Goodwin, G. P., Piazza, J., & Rozin, P. (2014). Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(1), 148–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 99, 315–331.

    Google Scholar 

  • Helgeson, C. (2013). The confirmational significance of agreeing measurements. Philosophy of Science, 80(5), 721–732.

    Google Scholar 

  • Helzer, E. G., Furr, R. M., Hawkins, A., Barranti, M., Blackie, L. E. R., & Fleeson, W. (2014). Agreement on the perception of moral character. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(12), 1698–1710.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hilbig, B. E., & Zettler, I. (2009). Pillars of cooperation: Honesty–humility, social value orientations, and economic behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 516–519.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jayawickreme, E., Meindl, P., Helzer, E. G., Furr, R. M., & Fleeson, W. (2014). Virtuous states and virtuous traits: How the empirical evidence regarding the existence of broad traits saves virtue ethics from the situationist critique. Theory and Research in Education, 12(3), 283–308.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and virtue ethics on the content of our character. Ethics, 114(3), 458–491.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kenny, D. A. (1991). A general model of consensus and accuracy in interpersonal perception. Psychological Review, 98(2), 155–163.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landy, J. F., & Uhlmann, E. L. (2018). Morality is personal. In K. Gray & J. Graham (Eds.), Atlas of Moral Psychology (pp. 121–132). New York, NY: Guilford Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latané, B., & Rodin, J. (1969). A lady in distress: Inhibiting effects of friends and strangers on bystander intervention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 5(2), 189–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2008). The HEXACO personality factors in the indigenous personality lexicons of English and 11 other languages. Journal of Personality, 76(5), 1001–1054.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2017). Acquaintanceship and self/observer agreement in personality judgment. Journal of Research in Personality, 70, 1–5.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lee, K., Ashton, M. C., & De Vries, R. E. (2005). Predicting workplace delinquency and integrity with the HEXACO and Five-factor models of personality structure. Human Performance. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

  • Lee, K., Ashton, M. C., Pozzebon, J. A., Visser, B. A., Bourdage, J. S., & Ogunfowora, B. (2009). Similarity and assumed similarity in personality reports of well-acquainted persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(2), 460–472.

    Google Scholar 

  • Luan, Z., Poorthuis, A. M. G., Hutteman, R., Denissen, J. J. A., Asendorpf, J. B., & van Aken, M. A. G. (2018). Unique predictive power of other-rated personality: An 18-year longitudinal study. Journal of Personality.

  • Martin, J. W., & Cushman, F. (2015). To punish or to leave: Distinct cognitive processes underlie partner control and partner choice behaviors. PLoS ONE, 10(4), 9–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer, M. L., Masten, C. L., Ma, Y., Wang, C., Shi, Z., Eisenberger, N. I., et al. (2013). Empathy for the social suffering of friends and strangers recruits distinct patterns of brain activation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(4), 446–454.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. B. (2013). Moral character: An empirical theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. B. (2014). Character and moral psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. B. (2017). Character and situationism: New directions. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 20(3), 459–471.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mischel, W. (2004). Toward an integrative science of the person. Annual Review of Psychology, 55(1), 1–22.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-active system theory of personality: Reconceptualising situations, dispositions, dynamics and invariance in personality structure. Psychological Review, 12(1), 246–268.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ott-Holland, C. J., Huang, J. L., Ryan, A. M., Elizondo, F., & Wadlington, P. L. (2014). The effects of culture and gender on perceived self-other similarity in personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 53, 13–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paris, P. (2016). Scepticism about virtue and the five-factor model of personality. Utilitas, 29(4), 1–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Powell, J., Lewis, P. A., Roberts, N., García-Fiñana, M., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2012). Orbital prefrontal cortex volume predicts social network size: An imaging study of individual differences in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279(1736), 2157–2162.

    Google Scholar 

  • Regan, D. T., Williams, M., & Sparling, S. (1972). Voluntary expiation of guilt: A field experiment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24(1), 42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, L. (1977). The Intuitive Psychologist And His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.

  • Roth, M., & Altmann, T. (2019). A multi-informant study of the influence of targets’ and perceivers’ social desirability on self-other agreement in ratings of the HEXACO personality dimensions. Journal of Research in Personality, 78, 138–147.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, D. C. (2009). Practical intelligence and the virtues. Oxford University Press.

  • Sabini, J., & Silver, M. (2005). Lack of Character? Situationism critiqued. Ethics, 115(3), 535–562.

    Google Scholar 

  • Snow, N. E. (2010). Virtue as social intelligence: An empirically grounded theory. New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. S., & Konrath, S. (2011). Telling more than we can know about intentional action. Mind & Language, 26(3), 353–380.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stiller, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2007). Perspective-taking and memory capacity predict social network size. Social Networks, 29(1), 93–104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strohminger, N., & Nichols, S. (2014). The essential moral self. Cognition, 131(1), 159–171.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sutcliffe, A. G., Dunbar, R. I. M., Binder, J. F., & Arrow, H. (2012). Relationships and the social brain: Integrating psychological and evolutionary perspectives. British Journal of Psychology, 103, 149–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thielmann, I., Zimmermann, J., Leising, D., & Hilbig, B. E. (2017). Seeing is knowing: On the predictive accuracy of self- and informant reports for prosocial and moral behaviours. European Journal of Personality, 31(4), 404–418.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A Person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1), 72–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Uhlmann, E. L., Zhu, L. L., & Diermeier, D. (2014). When actions speak volumes: The role of inferences about moral character in outrage over racial bigotry. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44(1), 23–29.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self—other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281–300.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vazire, S., & Carlson, E. N. (2011). Others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 104–108.

    Google Scholar 

  • Westra, E. (2019). Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character. Mind & Language.

  • Whewell, W. (1989). Novum organon renovatum. In R. E. Butts (Ed.), In William Whewell: Theory of scientific method. Hackett: Indianapolis.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Evan Westra

Authors
  1. Evan Westra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan Westra.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Westra, E. In Defense of Ordinary Moral Character Judgment. Erkenn 87, 1461–1479 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00257-w

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00257-w

Search

Navigation